Sipepa Nkomo regrets leaving MDC

BULAWAYO – Former Water minister Samuel Sipepa Nkomo, who recently resigned from politics, has revealed how he painfully regrets dumping the MDC then led by the late Morgan Tsvangirai for a splinter party led by Tendai Biti.

Nkomo was one of the 21 MPs recalled from Parliament in March 2015 after they formed their own party, MDC Renewal Team, in a move that saw Tsvangirai writing a letter to the august House advising that the legislators had severed their relationship with the country’s main opposition party.

Their expulsion saw by-elections being conducted in the vacant seats.

Speaking to Daily News at his home in Killarney where he announced both his resignation from the Joice Mujuru-led NPP, where he was the vice president and his ultimate retirement from politics, Sipepa Nkomo described his idea to dump the MDC as the worst in his 57-year political career.

Nkomo, a liberation war hero, who was incarcerated for years during his formative years in politics, still views the 2015 incident as the worst.

“The biggest mistake that I did was to leave the MDC with Tendai Biti resulting in our being expelled from Parliament, to me that was the biggest mistake I have ever made throughout my political career,” Nkomo said.

“On other things my feelings always told me that this is the right thing but on this particular one I think that was a big mistake.”

Nkomo even suggested that he regretted being associated with the then Biti-led outfit, which described Tsvangirai as a dictator and called him all sorts of names as the fissures between the two entities reached fever point.

Meanwhile, asked about the reality of theories that, Zanu PF had a tendency of deploying its secret operatives to infiltrate the opposition parties, Nkomo had this to say: “I think its correct, don’t play with this thing called CIO, (Robert) Mugabe created it, that is why at the start of every campaign period, you get a lot of opposition parties being formed, mushrooming and coming in to the playing field.”

He added: “I believe that some of them if not most of them are sponsored by the regime and so infiltration is something that I believe has happened.

“In NPP and MDC there is infiltration, there is no political party that is not infiltrated. This idea I think was copied from Russia. In NPP we could tell that so and so is a CIO,” Nkomo said.